IP Holders Have Control Over Every Single Character Detail In PlayStation All-Stars

October 12, 2012 Written by Jesse Meikle

PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale is intended to be a celebration of the PlayStation brand. Properly delivering on nearly 20 years of PlayStation heritage without upsetting legions of fans isn’t an easy task, so what’s SuperBot’s strategy for tackling the daunting feet of adapting 20(+?) beloved icons into a setting most of them are absolute strangers to? Giving the original developers an unbelievable amount of power over their IP’s and characters.

In a very entertaining interview, PlayStation All-Stars‘ lead game designer Omar Kendall revealed just how much control the original developers behind the characters composing Battle Royale’s cast have:

They were involved throughout the entire process. Everything about the characters, from the way they look to the way they walk and talk, punch and kick, all of that, the original developers had absolute approvals on every single detail.

Omar Kendall then pointed to Big Daddy as an example:

Ken Levine wrote the script for Bioshock’s Big Daddy and Little Sister’s story in this game. We took a couple of stabs at it, the general framework of the story was there, but there’s a very specific way that Ken likes Little Sister to talk and he wrote all of her lines.

Levine also requested that Little Sister always be seen with a syringe, a request SuperBot was happy to oblige. Omar also mentioned how this same level of immaculate authenticity went into the characters’ combat as well:

Heihachi probably has four or five or six dozen moves at this point, and in All-Stars, you only have about 2 dozen basic moves, then you’ve got throws and supers. Our approach was the same for all characters. We had to capture the essence, we had to boil it down to, ‘When I think of Kratos, I think of SQUARE SQUARE SQUARE, so I need SQUARE SQUARE SQUARE,’ and we captured that in the move-set wherever possible. Heihachi, one-one-two, or Twin Pistons, or Hell Sweeps, things like that. You have to hit on those, those are the elements that players are going to pick up on.

In PlayStation All-Stars first beta I certainly welcomed the ability to perform the former God of War‘s iconic Plume of Prometheus (square, square, triangle) and it’s exciting to hear that we can expect special treatment (wherever possible) for all of Battle Royale’s roster.

What character are you most excited to play as in PlayStation All-Stars? From what you’ve seen, do you feel like they’ve been represented justly in Battle Royale?